From Artless to Artful

Did you have art classes in high school? I did. I learned a lot in them. Not art—our teacher wasn't up to the task of squeezing any productions out of me—but rather my inadequacy at it. Those experiences registered not so much as scars but as shoals, to be avoided as I went off to seek something for which I had a little talent.

Now, I had a similar experience with handwriting. (Before you ask, no, I didn't abandon that altogether, though there were certainly times when I considered it, and in the era of computing I effectively have.) I'm left-handed by nature, and hence wrote naturally with my left hand. But writing left-handed in India was considered unacceptable, so I had to take after-school lessons to learn to write dextrously. The result was that I wrote disastrously, in a scrawl that was so ill-formed it wasn't even bad enough to be considered awful.

But sometime in 9th grade, I tired of the state of affairs. I wasn't quite sure what to do about it—after all, it wasn't for lack of practice, so more of the same wasn't going to help—so on a whim I opened up an encyclopaedia to the entry on calligraphy, and worked through tracing out letter-forms. I hadn't ever used a broad-nibbed pen (and didn't have one, either), so it took me a while before I realized the pattern to where the strokes were thin and thick. But I eventually got the hang of it, to the point of being able to reproduce a passable Textualis blackletter.

Which brings us back to art. I realized this summer that I was similarly tired of my inability to draw just about anything at all. I tend to have lots of pictures in my head, and ever since I've come to understand the visual language of cartooning I've wanted to learn it. (For me, reading my morning funnies is a bit like watching the infielders in a baseball game: periodically, I see something so stunning that I focus entirely on the particular act and forget all about the context of what I'm watching.) I've tried to work through cartooning books, but I tire of messing around with paper and pencil.

The game-changer was, amazingly, a software program. My OQO 1+ came with a copy of Alias (now Adobe) Sketchbook Pro (v. 2.0.1), which I'd never used in the two years I've had the machine. One day I idly started the application, picked the felt-tip marker tool, set it down on the canvas...and saw this:

That's right, the ink spread, as if it were a real pen put to real paper.

Something about that moment was magical. As I explored the application more and found out how much more it simulated the physics of paper-based media, I was hooked. I was in the process of preparing the Web site for PASTE 2008, which I co-chaired, and I was annoyed at the lack of any visual embellishment. Perhaps, I thought, I could fix that myself. So I came up with this, which you can see in context.

Buoyed by this success (by which I mean, I asked a few other PASTE dignitaries what they thought about it, and they gave me stiff-lipped responses to the effect that any visual embellishment is welcome—carefully saying nothing at all about this specific one), I started to design images for use in our new book-let. Now you know whom to blame for all the images in the first version of How to Design Worlds, though I am rather pleased with the cow and the UFO (both also to be found on the cover), and by the graphic accompanying “The Movie Principle” (section 4.4, page 11 in the book).

All this can only lead to hubris—and it has. Our latest victim is another wall of the same room that we painted earlier. We now have a little mountain thing going,

which includes my personal rendition of the Pão de Açúcar:

Somewhere in here is a message for my art teachers, but I'm not sure what. Perhaps just, “Don't worry, you didn't miss much”.

Major Faux Pas

Life was tougher a hundred years ago, and tougher still in the face of open discrimination. Yet while people like Jackie Robinson are celebrated across the US, an earlier pioneer, Major Taylor, the first black cycling world champion, has been entirely forgotten.

Or would be, if a band of enthusiasts didn't have their way. But this group has kept his memory alive, and just under a month ago crossed a milestone: a statue of Major Taylor now stands outside the public library in Worcester, MA, a city where Taylor lived for much of his active life.

I wasn't there for the statue per se—I find most of these civic monuments uniformly ghastly—but to support Lynn Tolman, who has been the most visible member of this tireless group. They did have two headliners attend the event, Greg Lemond and Edwin Moses, and I figured they might have something interesting to say. In the end, things came out backwards. The statue is quite superb:

Moses was interesting enough, while Lemond continued to embarrass himself and those listening to him. It's one thing for Lemond to declaim about drugs in the sport: he knows something about life in the peloton in a way that the rest of us never will. (It doesn't help that he has become a kind of confidant-in-chief for suspect riders.) But at an event like this—which he knew about well in advance—he not only rambled without continuity or coherence part of the time but, worse, didn't so for the rest. When he wasn't rambling, he was telling us about how terrible a time he had had as a young American in Europe, and somehow linked his own tribulations (immense though they were) to Taylor's (which were unimaginably greater). In the end, one felt pity for Lemond and an even greater sense of Taylor's accomplishment.

So, no photograph of self-promoting celebrities. Here's Tolman during her pleasant and modest address:

Third Time Still a Charm: Guston's Drawings

Inspired by my previous successes following The Economist's art recommendations, I spent a good part of today at the Morgan Library & Museum in NYC for their exhibition of drawings by Philip Guston. I had only loosely heard of Guston as an abstract expressionist, so normally I would never have taken the trouble to attend such an exhibition. But the article was persuasive, and I'm glad it was.

After a career of abstract expressionism (and protesting pop art), Guston underwent a crisis in the mid-1960s. Saying, for instance, “I like old-fashioned things like gravity”, Guston began to paint objects in the world around him. This was not, however, a return from the abstract to the concrete so much as a view of the concrete through eyes of abstraction. Some of his earliest paintings in this phase—just a few black brushstrokes on white paper, really—are stunning, such as 1967's Air or Wave II, which is simply an overlapping cascade running eccentrically down the paper. The books he paints become indistinguishable from skyscrapers, gravitas united with gravity.

Then, in 1970s, he finally cuts loose. A flood of drawings, first of caricatured Klansmen and then of boots and books and cobwebs and cherries and the rest of the trash of existence, give his work both a comic-like absurdity and a weight and feeling of urgency as he rushes to pump out his emotions. Some of his most wonderful, color drawings were executed in the very year of his death.

It would be pat to say Guston balanced the literal and the metaphorical, the abstract and the concrete, with ease—pat, and wrong. Instead he struggled with them, and put his struggles on paper. Thus on the one hand he was able to say,

The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough... Also there was a desire, a powerful desire though an impossibility, to paint things as if one had never seen them before, as if one had come from another planet.

like he painted his books. But he also arrested himself from returning to his earlier phase as an architecture astronaut:

Sometimes when my painting is becoming too artistic, I'll say to myself, ‘What if the shoe salesman asked you to paint a shoe on his window?’

If the salesman had asked, he would have received a cartoon showing the metaphorical weight of the world being fitted to a size 9.

Oops!... I Did It Again

Recently I wrote about my experience running into an art exhibition in New York that I'd learned about thanks to The Economist. Continuing my trend of being a man about town, I've done it again.

I had given myself over a day of free time in London to see Brilliant Women, a collection of portraits of 18th-Century Bluestockings. But I met so many people at Imperial College—and so enjoyed my time there—that I simply never got to the National Portait Gallery. The Imperial folks had also kept me from paying homage at Foyles, so my schedule was looking rather dire. Fortunately I had booked to fly on one of the new late-afternoon flights out of Heathrow (thank you, Open Skies!), so I had a little time in the morning. Foyles opens at 9:30, the NPG at 10:00, and the former is just up Charing Cross from the latter. Still, it was a close-run thing.

The exhibition (which runs for another week, as of this writing) was worth the manic tour of the Piccadilly Line, the second time The Economist's art critic (was it the same one?) has come through for me. The NPG has some of the best captions of art anywhere (well, at least if you read English), and this exhibition was in the same vein. But there were also letters and assorted memorabilia.

Two gems. There is Katherine Read's portrait of Elizabeth Carter, and it is praised as “quite unlike the common run of staring portraits”. And a young Mary Wollstonecraft, just a year or two shy of breaking out into the limelight, is sucking up to Catherine Macaulay in a letter on December 16, 1790:

I respect M^rs Macaulay Graham because she contends for laurels whilst most of her sex only seek for flowers.

If you find yourself in the vinicity, run.

I Am Not a Spammer, I Am a Free Man!

Houston is an eccentric city. Its apparent mono-culture actually creates a remarkably strong and flavorful counter-culture, of which there is probably no more delightful manifestation than the Art Car movement.

Two lesser, but even more eccentric, attractions are the Orange Show and Beer Can House. And now, a twofer: the NYT informs us that the former has acquired the latter, melding the city's passion for eccentricity and capitalism. The article contains a key insight about Houston:

Marilyn Oshman, the art patron who founded the Orange Show, said it was no accident Houston played host to such attractions. “One good thing about not having any zoning is you can do stuff,” Ms. Oshman said.

The problem lies in notifying your friends of such events. I sent email to old Houston friends with the title “Orange Show buys Beer Can”, to which one responded:

I deleted this message as spam (but didn't purge) before I noticed that it was from you. I guess "Orange Show buys Beer Can" is more like the title of spam that I get than a typical legitimate message.

When the names of a city's museums trigger spam filters, you know it's doing something right.

The Woman With Qualities

Have you ever had the experience of reading about an art exhibit in, say, the Wall Street Journal or The Economist? If this week something excellent is opening in Basel, next week it's something else in St. Petersburg—oh, and you really must check out this temporary exhibit in the trendiest new district of London.

Who attends these? Are there people who jump out of their couches and say, “You know, darling, we really must pop over to Basel for the weekend; this new ironic statement about post-modernism sounds so droll!”, and then proceed to buy tickets? Or maybe nobody does, and these reports are really just meant to make the readership jealous. Indeed, I think it's all about promoting the brand: you want your reader to think they're part of a group in which everyone else (but them) gets to jet off to Basel at the drop of a hat—and feels good about being part of such an exclusive club.

Well, no more. I have joined the other side. I read the Economist's report on the Frick Collection's special exhibit on Parmigianino's Antea, and knew this was one I would make. I passed on it on multiple trips to the city the past two months, expecting that Kathi and I would see it over spring break. And we did.

Not only was the exhibit worthwhile, but so was the Frick itself, which I have never visited before. It reminded me most of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, one of my very favorite art museums in the world. In most other countries, the Brera would be a national jewel; in Italy, it seems to be a bit of an also-ran to all but the cognoscenti. In the Brera I had the experience walking into just about every room of saying, “Oh, and that's here too?” The Frick was rather like that.

One of the most important things about reviewers—of books, movies, shoes, computers, bicycles, or any other pieces of art—is not whether they're “good” or “bad”; it's about whether you and they are calibrated. If they get every single review “wrong”, that's much more helpful than doing so only half the time. This is much harder to establish with the Economist, whose book reviews are written by an unattributed team, not by a single person. Likewise, having seen and liked the Antea exhibit doesn't help me much with future art exhibits.

But since I'm not often free to jet off to Basel (they're always troubling me with chores around here), it doesn't much matter.

The What in the Where?

I was watching (with subtitles) Godard and Gorin's cartoonish Marxist rant, Tout Va Bien. In it is this remarkable sequence of lines, as two voices conjure up a movie:

There'll be a country.
In the country, there will be a countryside.
In the countryside, there will be cities.

In most of human history, this last line probably seemed entirely natural. The great secular and spiritual centers, such as castles and temples, were built in part to dominate their surroundings, serving as an overpowering beacon to the visitor from the countryside. And yet, to an urban creature like me, cities are what there is; countrysides are what you obtain by subtraction. To hear of cities as the passive actors, planted into the countryside, is remarkable.

When I'm in Paris, I imagine what it must have been like to boat down the Seine, pass the exurbs of huts and fields, and then come upon the towering majesty of the Ile de Cite. (Likewise for Madern Gerthener's great cathedral alongside the Main in Frankfurt, or any number of other such monuments.) That's why the view of the Notre Dame that most impresses me is from the waterside on the embankment—from down below. Then we see the cathedral as its builders actually intended it to be seen.

Viva Bollywood

I'm usually hopelessly behind popular culture icons. For instance, I rarely catch TV shows until they've peaked. So when I saw a promising preview of a new CBS show named Viva Laughlin, I set up the DVR to record it.

Little could I have imagined how strange it would be. It was a bizarre mix of film noir, slickish production values, flat characters, a quirky character (the lead detective) who rapidly turned creepy...and none of that was remotely as peculiar as its most bizarre characteristic: it was based on Bollywood. Indeed, from the very opening scene, characters would periodically meander into a combination of lip-synched and karaoke musicals, in this case pop music standards.

For all this, CBS demonstrated an absolute lack of ambition—an irony that can't be lost on a show situated in a casino. They didn't seem to believe in any of the elements, least of all the musical, leaving behind an utterly castrated and confusing show.

It figures that the one time I try to catch a show at its inception, the show would be cancelled after a single show (in Australia; they let it run for just two shows in the US). So much for my ability to pick popular culture: I ended up picking Fox Force Five.

There's No Hills in This Country

If you're an up-and-coming musician trying to catch a break, here's a trick for the new millennium. Give your songs the same names as ones people might be searching for (they don't even have to be covers, as you'll see in a moment), and get them into iTunes (okay, so maybe I contradict myself...). Indeed, I've lately been downloading versions of songs by artists I've never heard of, often to great musical advantage.

Poking about in this fashion, I came across a song by a singer named Wenche. It's a confusingly poor choice of name: if you're playing it for the hoots you'd spell it right, and if you're not, it seems an unfortunate association.

There was something else about Wenche, too. She was a good singer with solid (if entirely traditional) arrangements, and she'd pass for a country singer in any of the Red States of America...except she was just a little too country, you know? Her accent was just a little too pure, her drawl just a little too acute, her contralto trilled just a little too much. And there was still that Renfest-gone-bad name. Wenche?

Well, wouldn't you know, the too-country-to-be-true Wenche is Wenche Hartmann, and she's Danish. It was like Sue Foley all over again.

For a moment I hoped that Wenche would be playing in Denmark the week after next, but her Web site, despite claiming that “Wenche keeps a close contact with her audience”, doesn't list a tour date until early 2008. And as for her position in the musical pecking order, she's still thrilled that she “had the great honour of being the opening speaker at the Fish Festival in Strandby”.

Film Festival Time!

Three of the best things about summer in Providence: (usually) great weather, Crazy Burger, and the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

This year's festival was pretty typical in quality, so I approached it as usual. Once it begins, I go into a trance-like state of absolute concentration. The festival sells six-packs of session passes, which is just about as much as a human can consume anyway. This year, over four days, I made it to seven sessions featuring a total of thirty-six movies. Don't let that last number scare you: some were an hour-and-a-half long and some as little as two minutes. That, of course, is the beauty of the festival.

The typical festival movie is just what you'd expect of independent film: pretentious, self-indulgent, and too long (yes, there are five minute movies that are too long). But you could level an equally long litany against traditional movies, too. What stands out in independent film is passion, gutsiness, a realism forced by underproduction, an urgency imposed by tight budgets, and talent forced to stand in the spotlight in all its human, unvarnished glory. It's usually the case that the two-minute shorts are the very best movies: it's no surprise that they are invariably comedies, because they draw directly on the skill embodied in the perfect set-up of a stand-up comedian; though, because they transport this skill into a new dimension, the ones that make a social or political statement are even better. And the visual and production effects of some of these movies entirely belie their film school and other such origins.

As always, the festival had some suprises and some disappointments. My picks from the animated shorts were Fish, but No Cigar; Nasuh; Par Avion (a haiku of a movie: within the first three seconds, the animation succeeded in placing you on the banks of the Seine in Paris); Perpetuum Mobile (Leonardo da Vinci rightly credited as a props designer); and Voodoo Bayou. Of the movies, Entry Level was pleasant and refreshing. Amongst documentaries, Across the Plateau (Chuan Yue Gao Yuan) was a delight, while wordlessly emphasizing the growing Chinese presence in Tibet in two capacities: construction and the military (those two not being entirely independent). And finally, the movie that stole my heart was the short, Rocketboy.

We caught our first festival the week we moved to Providence in 2000, not having known of its existence before. Since then, we've screwed up only one summer, when we accidentally made travel plans for that same weekend. That so traumatized us that we start checking the festival calendar months in advance, so as to not repeat that mistake. The festival continues to grow in size and depth. Like a comet, it invades our life every summer, sprinkling a host of meteors about us, and satiates my entire year's need for movies in a week. Summer, and life, wouldn't be the same without it.

Bush(n)e(l)l of Acorn

I didn't really want to shake Jesse Bushnell's hand.

Normally I'd be glad to, grease and all. But Jesse, whom I'd known as someone from bike rides, from watching the spring classics in his bike shop (The Hub, which doubles up as a furniture shop, The Zoo), and as one of my bike mechanics, had suddenly shot to fame as a principal participant in this summer's most entertaining happening: the maiden voyage of the Acorn, a replica of the US Civil War submarine, the Turtle. As to where Jesse's hands had been, this New York Times article says it all. (Even the droll, coolly ironic tone of the article cannot disguise the glee of a reporter assigned to a story whose copy virtually writes itself.)

So I go down to the Hub:

(Jesse) Dude, how's it going?

(Me) You're asking me? I'm surprised to see you still a free man.

[Grins, pauses, grins again...] Oops!

So here I am, interviewing Jesse Bushnell. What follows is a reconstruction of a conversation; I went in with prepared questions, but life is not a prepared activity when Jesse is around.

What's your connection with the other two?

They're both great friends. The Duke's my best friend.

Mr. Riley was recorded as emerging from the sub with a beer. Do you think it's safe to drink and dive?

The beer was intentional! That was to thin the blood. There's a ton of lead in that thing, so you've got to keep the blood thin, and the alcohol does that.

Given the quote by which the nation now best knows you, I have to ask: boxers or briefs?

Tighty-whities!

Owing to your action, do you think Alberto Gonzales would be justified in upping the terror level to a new color code? Say up to Celeste?

Who's that guy?

Aren't you embarassed about the lack of a propulsion mechanism, given that you work in a bike shop?

Dude, that's what saved us! The FBI told us that if we'd had a screw, they'd have definitely arrested us.

What's your relationship to David Bushnell?

The Duke tells me I'm related.

This unfortunately stole my next few questions, such as: was he related to Nolan Bushnell (of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese fame); whether, like the senior Bushnell, he too planned to migrate to making naval mines; and whether, given that David Bushnell moved to Georgia and adopted the name of David Bush, Jesse was also related to George W. Bush.

Some of the other things Jesse related was how the media glare was so intense he had to be escorted out the back door; how he got bitten by a dog while he was in the East River, and got stung by several jellyfish; and how the FBI descended on him. He said he was at one point bobbing around in the sub, looking out over at the Statue of Liberty and thinking about how cool all this was, when he saw a group of helicopters heading directly at him and began to revise his evaluation. When the Feds eventually got to him they asked him about various aspects of his life, including details of the houseboat on which he lives. He asked them how they knew about it. Their reply: “Because we have agents on it right now.”

The last word should surely go to Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly who, with New York sangfroid, called the Acorn the “creative craft of three adventuresome individuals”. Give the man a medal for his understanding that such utterly unfettered and wholly midsdirected creativity is precisely what makes America so insanely great.

King for a Day

It was May 1997, and we were driving between Dayton and Houston. It was the proverbial cold, dark night, and the rain was pouring, just pouring in buckets. We crept along I-55 into Memphis, trying to find a hotel. A few miles out of town, I was playing with the tuner trying to find a station—a challenge, to hear something over the din of rain—when I heard a guitar note, and was transfixed. I stayed frozen as we drove into Memphis, bathed in the wonder of the blues.

It was the first time I had ever been moved by music so deeply as to feel a city, a population, a race, a culture. I knew little, then, about the privations Memphis had experienced, yet already I could feel it in my bones from just those few guitar notes. What I learned later only deepened my appreciation for what I heard, but what I read simply could not match what I'd felt.

It's easy to argue that B.B. King is too commercial, too simplistic, too mainstream, too easy to appreciate. He is indeed all those things. But he is also capable of music of great power, and he opened my mind that night. In a few spare notes he made me feel a side of American culture that isn't in the version exported to foreigners.

Today was a great thrill, as B.B. received an honorary degree from Brown.

It's the first time I've attended even part of the main graduation ceremony at Brown, and my reward was getting to hear B.B. offer us a brief piece, a capella. Enjoying it as much as anyone else was Craig C. Mello, Brown alum and 2006 Nobel Laureate (seated).

Long Live the King!